DVDs with audio description at Toronto Public Library

If you’re blind or visually impaired, or if you’re just keen or these sorts of things, you can watch DVDs with audio description – additional narration that talks you through the movie, telling you whatever’s happening that you can’t figure out from the the main soundtrack.

I could go on a big diversion here about what a total nightmare it has been over the last decade just to make sure the description track from the first-run theatrical release actually makes it to home video. I could also describe how I actually maintained the master list of DVDs with audio description for years until I realized that threatened to become a lifelong unpaid (and unappreciated) task.

Anyway. TPL has a couple of hundred DVDs with audio description. The problem is they are really hard to look up in the catalogue. You have to use exactly this subject heading:

Video recordings for people with visual disabilities

You must also know to search by subject. A seemingly simple step like that is actually way beyond the capacity of most users, nor should it be their problem, nor does the new catalogue make subject searches easy.

Yes, there’s a link to that search on an accessibility page. But had you ever heard of that page? Did you know TPL had DVDs with description? Did you know how to find them?

That’s a lot of problems. But one of them has been solved.

Easy ways to tell people how to find described DVDs

At my suggestion, the crack TPL Web team (that is not an ironic statement) added a bunch of shortcuts. They’ve been set up so you can tell people how to search for DVDs when you’re just talking to them, or are running a radio show, or are using something other than an online medium where somebody can click a link.

It’s real simple. Just tell your friends to go to any of these:

• TPL.ca/describeddvds

• TPL.ca/audiodescription

• TPL.ca/descriptivevideo

• TPL.ca/moviesfortheblind

Nice easy-to-remember phrases. Tell all your friends.

(If you want to write out TorontoPublicLibrary.CA instead, you can.)

A week later, TPL says the same thing

…on the little-known TPL accessibility blog.

‘Pirates of the Caribbean,’ Mike?

Disgraced budget chief/library harasser Mike Del Grande: “My feeling at this point is to allow the mayor to have his day of sunshine and for me to go home early and watch a movie.”

TPL DVD additions 2012

I may come to regret this, but I now have the annual habit of collating the English-language DVDs for grownups that the library buys in the previous year. You will of course recall that the impetus was the infamous Pirates of the Caribbean case, where Del Grande and Palacio battled for supremacy in who could provide stupider quotes to the press about TPL collections policy.

Putting this list together isn’t actually as easy as using 2012 as a search field. Nonetheless, I think I located all but maybe one or two titles, which I then painstakingly copy-edited. I’m also giving you a much more rational sort order than the one TPL uses.

Want the 2011 list? I suppose I could make it a separate posting, but it’s part of the Del Grande/Palacio post.

Unique sequence of events

1. I submit blue suggestion form for obscure gay-sports documentary, Straight Acting (sic)

2. Library actually buys it (and not a niggardly one or two copies)

3. I have the only hold on the title, since barely anybody knows of its existence

4. I get Yorkville’s copy. Later, I walk into Yorkville, we check it in by plunking it down on the pad, and (with permission) I merchandise it face-out it on the high-interest-DVD shelf

   

I promise you this has never happened before in the history of the Toronto Public Library.

Disposition of Blu-Ray discs

Since the library doesn’t lend Blu-Rays, yet some films are available solely as DVD/Blu-Ray combo packs,

1. doesn’t that leave a small pile of orphan Blu-Ray discs?

2. couldn’t they just be shipped to Calgary, which does lend Blu-Rays? (They’d have to print out their own jackets and so on to be inserted in cases, but TPL does that for its own items, so I don’t see that as a barrier.)

I asked Susan Caron about this and, not atypically, got no response.